The Windup Girl

By: Paolo Bacigalupi

Narrated by: Jonathan Davis

Length: 19 hrs and 34 mins

Publisher's summary

Earphones Award Winner (AudioFile Magazine)

Anderson Lake is a company man, AgriGen's Calorie Man in Thailand. Under cover as a factory manager, Anderson combs Bangkok's street markets in search of foodstuffs thought to be extinct, hoping to reap the bounty of history's lost calories.

There, he encounters Emiko...Emiko is the Windup Girl, a strange and beautiful creature. One of the New People, Emiko is not human; instead, she is an engineered being, creche-grown and programmed to satisfy the decadent whims of a Kyoto businessman, but now abandoned to the streets of Bangkok. Regarded as soulless beings by some, devils by others, New People are slaves, soldiers, and toys of the rich in a chilling near future in which calorie companies rule the world, the oil age has passed, and the side effects of bio-engineered plagues run rampant across the globe.

What happens when calories become currency? What happens when bio-terrorism becomes a tool for corporate profits, when said bio-terrorism's genetic drift forces mankind to the cusp of post-human evolution? In The Windup Girl, award-winning author Paolo Bacigalupi returns to the world of The Calorie Man (Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award-winner, Hugo Award nominee, 2006) and Yellow Card Man (Hugo Award nominee, 2007) in order to address these poignant questions.

BONUS AUDIO: In an exclusive introduction, author Paolo Bacigalupi explains how a horrible trip to Thailand led to the idea for The Windup Girl.

©2009 Paolo Bacigalupi (P)2009 Audible, Inc.

Critic reviews

• Hugo Award, Best Novel, 2010
• Nebula Award, Best Novel, 2009
• Best Books of 2009, Publishers Weekly
• 10 Best Fiction Books of 2009, Time magazine
• Best Sci-Fi and Fantasy 2009, Library Journal

"Paolo Bacigalupi's debut sci-fi novel is a stunner, especially as interpreted under the careful ministrations of narrator Jonathan Davis. The novel postulates a corrupt near-future society in Southeast Asia, where powerful corporations vie for control over rice yields by wielding bioengineered viruses as tools for profit." ( AudioFile)

" The Windup Girl will almost certainly be the most important SF novel of the year for its willingness to confront the most cherished notions of the genre, namely that our future is bright and we will overcome our selfish, cruel nature." ( Book Page)

"A classic dystopian novel likely to be short listed for the Nebula and Hugo Awards" ( SF Signal)

A great story I won't forget

It isn’t that often I can say that the images of a story stick with me after it is compete like this one has. It presents an interesting and thought provoking look at a possible future for our world. The characters were flawed, like you would expect in a world where life is full of tragedy and the future looks bleak. A warning to readers, there is some disturbing and graphic violence in this book which is not easy to forget. The effect of violence on major characters influences the direction of the story. I read several comments about the pace of the book, and although it might be true the overall length of the first half could be shortened, the development of the characters and painting the picture of the world they lived in is what made the ending so real.

Maybe a better read than listen

The foreign (Thai) words and names coupled with the future-speak of the Windup Girl's world made this an exceptionally difficult story to follow. I found it alternately riveting and dry, and feel that this story would be best read, not listened to. This is no slight to the author or narrator (who was outstanding).

Good narrator but boring book

I can't understand how this book won so many awards. It must have been a bad book year.

Good book made even better by great narration

"The Windup Girl" made quite a splash when it came out. It won the Nebula and the Hugo and it was the author's debut novel (although he'd written four previous novels that he couldn't get published).

I bought a copy when it came out in paperback but I struggled so much with all the strange Thai names and words in the first chapter that I put it to one side and somehow it never came back to the top of the reading pile.

When I saw that there was an Audible Frontiers version, read by Jonathan Davis, who did such a good job reading "Theiftaker", I decided to give it another try.

"The Windup Girl" is set in a far future Bangkok and is written from the point of view of five different characters: three men an American from one of the calorie companies that controls the world's food supply, a Malay Chinese refugee who has lost everything, a Thai Captain in the Environment Ministry who passionately defends his country; and two women, a Thai subordinate to the Captain who has her own agenda and a New Person, the Windup Girl of the title, who was manufactured in Japan.,

Jonathan Davis gives each of them a distinctive voice, in the right accent. He performs rather than simply narrating. He clearly studied the text carefully. Every inflection supports the author's meaning. He pronounces the many foreign words and formal titles with an easy familiarity that made me feel part of the landscape. The production standards are high. The music is appropriate. This is a movie for the ear.

The book turned out to be everything I had hoped for. Bacigalupi (the name is Italian and means "kiss of the wolf. I know this because John Irving used it for his main writer character in "One Night At Twisted River". I wonder if he's ever read "The Windup Girl?) has created a plausible future in an exotic (to me) setting. It is a hard world and the main characters all face the same challenge: deciding what they are prepared to do to survive and having to live with the person they become with each survival decision they make.

The book has a good plot and strong local colour but at its heart it is character driven.The characters do not divide easily into good or bad. They are products of their pasts who, under the extreme pressure of their current circumstances, have to decide what they really value and what they are prepared to sacrifice to get it. Some of the characters are hard to like but all of them feel real and all of them, even the most selfish and fear-driven, won my sympathy.

Bacigalupi is willing to be truly brutal when the story demands it. The sex show that the Windup Girl is forced to perform is graphic and detailed and completely devoid of any trace of eroticism. In a land where keeping face is everything, Bacigalupi show us that this performance is about humiliation, shame and power. One of the characters is forced to make a public apology. Coming from the West this didn't strike me as a big deal. Bacifalupi put me far enough inside the Thai character's head that I was shocked at the vicious, merciless annihilation of the man's pride and identity.

It's a long book, more than nineteen hours of listening, but it seemed to fly by and I regretted reaching the end simply because I had enjoyed it so much.

Read this book if you're in the mood for something thought provoking, difficult but fundamentally human.

Best I've read in a while

Bacigalupi writes one of the best dystopian sci-fi novels I've read in a very long time. It had me from start to finish. Highly recommended

Hooked from beginning to end

What a fantastic dystopian world inhabited by wonderful characters. I generally get impatient on the really long books but this one had me hooked from beginning to end.

It will be a movie... Or is it already?!

If you could sum up The Windup Girl in three words, what would they be?

Detailed, realistic, entertaining

Who was your favorite character and why?

The tiger...sad...and yet a hero

Which character – as performed by Jonathan Davis – was your favorite?

Anderson; strong character

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

No...too long!

Any additional comments?

It was a surprise... I didn't know it would be so well written or performed. Took some time to understand the place and the characters.

average

All of the reviews LOVED this book so I had high hopes. Maybe too high...I kept waiting to be wowed and never was. The story was interesting and the characters were interesting, though a little confusing at times with all the Thai name, however it was slow at the beginning and just never picked up. I kept waiting for something powerful that never came. The story wasn't bad it just wasn't outstanding

Unexpectedl great

I thought the story seemed boring at first, but it snowballed and got better as it went. Great performance. The emotions of the characters become your own. Great ending as well.

OK story, lots of things unanswered though (slight spoilers)

The narration was good, but had a hard time getting into the story. It obviously took place at some point in the future, but I found it annoying that the world was not well developed. The story fails to give any reason for things being the way they are, as far as why there is such an energy deficit in this world. Why no solar / wave / wind power plants? I can understand why there may be no petrochemical type energy - it is simply far enough in the future that it is gone. Why is there no longer chemical reactions that would facilitate gun powder? A little bit of background on how the world, politically speaking, came to be would have been nice. I don’t know, all the unanswered things about the world in general kind of ruined it for me.